Who is this Guy?

I’m an independent software consultant with broad experience in several programming languages and technologies with a particular focus on JavaScript and TypeScript. I specialize in application development—AI-powered or otherwise, developer relations, and AI and Agile engineering practices. I know Redis really, really well. And I’m an amateur radio operator.

I started my career as—gasp—a COBOL programmer. But don’t hold that against me, it just gives me perspective. I’ve spent much of my career programming in the most popular of the semi-colon delimited languages including C++, Java, and JavaScript. These days it’s mostly TypeScript and lately that TypeScript spends a lot of its time talking to LLMs and vector databases.

Speaking and teaching are something I thoroughly enjoy. I love to learn new things, technical or otherwise, and share them with anyone who will listen. My mother says I’ve been doing this since I was a kid. I speak about things that interest me—technology, software, electronics, radio. Sometimes several of them at once. I love to add humor and strong themes to my talks. A talk about vector databases and Bigfoot is way better than a talk just about vector databases.

In addition to speaking and programming, I studied electronics in high school and enjoy building circuits, burning myself with a soldering iron, and working with small hardware devices like the Arduino and the Raspberry Pi. No one has actually paid me to do this sort of work. Yet.

Given all that, it was inevitable that I would develop an interest in amateur radio. My callsign is W8GUY and I’m partial do digital modes. There’s something compelling about having computers talk to each other over radio.

Outside of tech, I’m a hard-boiled geek interested in role-playing games, science fiction, and fantasy. I also have a slightly less geeky interest in history and linguistics and an even less geeky interest in camping and bushcraft. I watch way too many YouTube videos on all of these topics.

I live in Ohio with my wife and high school sweetheart—they’re the same person, just to be clear. We have three adult sons—Eagle Scouts, all of them—who visit regularly and are big nerds each in their own way. I couldn’t be prouder.